Western Digital's Helium-Filled HDD

Last week Hitachi (an acquisition of Western Digital) announced their latest development, a hard drive that promises higher capacity at lower cost of ownership through energy consumption. How? By designing a sealed drive and filling the internal gas with helium instead of oxygen.

When a hard drive reads and writes data a little platter is spun to a certain position so a magnetic needle can collect data from that area of the disc. WDC's helium-filled drives promise lower cost of ownership by reducing friction during this spinning and maintaining lower temperatures during run-time. Seems meaningless, but the energy savings running a couple of dozen of these things 24 hours a day really adds up. The company has also announced that the in addition to the decreased cost of ownership capacity of these drives could increase by up to 40% which is up to 5.6TB.

"An enormous portion -- up to 40% -- of the costs in new cloud based data centers will be attributed to operational costs such as power use and floor space, Collins said. Today the bulk of data center costs are capital expenditures, including hardware purchases.
"This is driving a lot of opportunities to differentiate products in the cloud," Collins said. "The attributes of the sealed drive platform make it the ideal foundation for bulk and cold storage applications in enterprise and cloud datacenters."

Lucas Mearian, Computerworld

The drives are on schedule to hit the market in Q1 2013.